It is well known that flicker occurs in LCoS devices when they are operated in a digital drive mode. With a digital drive a pulse width modulation scheme encodes gray scale levels into a series of binary pulses. In this implementation the pulse width is not varied but the encoding is done with a sequence of bits. In order to avoid charge migration in the LCoS, the bits are applied with an alternating voltage that has a 50% duty cycle so that the average voltage is zero and the RMS is non-zero. The liquid crystal molecules, which have limited rotational viscosity, responds to the RMS of the voltage. Flicker arises because the viscosity of the liquid crystal molecules limit the molecules' ability to respond to a rapidly changing voltage.